Dowd and Friedman

In “The Zero Parallax View” MoDo says the 3-D revolution has spurred people to desert their home entertainment centers and actually go into theaters.  The Moustache of Wisdom says “It’s All About Schools,” and that by rebuilding Yemen’s educational system, the West could prevent the country from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.  Tommy, Tommy, Tommy…  Rebuilding schools isn’t half as much fun as blowing shit up…  Here’s MoDo:

How much does Phil McNally love 3-D?

So much that he legally listed his name on his British driver’s license, and later on his Social Security card and American license, as “Phil Captain III D McNally.”

“Apparently you can’t have numbers in your name in the U.K., so I had to do Roman numerals,” the DreamWorks global stereoscopic supervisor told me. “My dad wasn’t impressed. Parents are very possessive of the names they give you.”

Captain 3-D, a 42-year-old Northern Ireland native, is also known as the resident “hurl-o-meter” at DreamWorks, the guy who goes through every frame to adjust the amount of depth, dial the intensity up or down, and fix the right-eye/left-eye camera settings so that moviegoers can enjoy dragons skydiving past them without having to turn their popcorn bags into motion-sickness bags.

“I am certain that it is not good to be in a business in which the result of what you do is to make people hurl,” says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation.

Because 3-D gels in the brain, the Captain spends his time seeking an equipoise where objects can fly around without making you dizzy — a synchronicity that has a technical name that sounds like a spy thriller: “the zero parallax setting.”

As we realized watching James Cameron’s “Avatar” explode into the highest-grossing film of all time, 3-D technology has come a long way since it was the butt of jokes on “I Love Lucy” and a gimmick with polarized glasses in the ’50s horror classics “House of Wax” and “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

“I’ve always referred to it as my father’s 3-D,” Katzenberg says with a grin, “where we used to wear those goofy red-and-blue glasses that you didn’t want to actually turn and have somebody that you know, care about, or lust after look at you because you would be deeply humiliated, right?”

I had coffee with Katzenberg in Los Angeles recently because ever since he was “blown away” by seeing “The Polar Express” in an Imax theater, he has emerged as one of his industry’s biggest 3-D boosters, even when it meant rooting for Cameron’s blockbuster for another studio.

He knows that a 3-D revolution would be great for his business by spurring people to desert their home entertainment centers and actually go into theaters. It’s rare in this economy, he notes, for people to opt for “the more expensive, higher-end experience first.”

Echoing the King of the World, Captain 3-D observes that “the struggle of movies has always been to transport viewers to a virtual world.” Directors simply have to get past their denial. “They’ve spent their whole lives eliminating 3-D to make theatrical 2-D,” he said, “and now they’ve got to go from real-life 3-D into theatrical 3-D.”

Katzenberg says that “if you look at the history of film, there have now been three great revolutions. The first was silent to talkies. The second was black-and-white to color, 70 years ago. And this is the third great revolution, a quantum leap. We’re at the top of the waterfall with 3-D. And this is going to cascade down into virtually every facet of our lives where we are encountering video imagery or even photography.”

The 3-D market is popping. Studios are fighting over 3-D theater space and are well aware that the handful of new 3-D movies made in the last year represented a disproportionate chunk of the box office. Burberry is planning to live-stream a catwalk from London in 3-D. ESPN and Discovery Channel both plan on beaming 3-D into homes, and the porn industry is nuzzling the new technology. Tinto Brass, the 76-year-old Italian director of “Caligula,” said he wants to overhaul his original and make the first 3-D porn feature. (What’s next? A chain of adult movie theatres called Cl-Imax?)

Katzenberg envisions a world where you can process so many pixels into space that we’ll all be watching 3-D TVs (without glasses in 10 to 20 years) and seeing every big-scale movie — not to mention every poster or painting you walk by on a wall — in 3-D.

Even Sandra Bullock comedies or dramas like “The Godfather”?

“Absolutely,” he replied.

But both Katzenberg and the Captain concede that some movies may be too action-packed or intense — yes, they’re talking about you, Michael Bay and Martin Scorsese — to be experienced in 3-D because, as McNally says, “carrying that much data into the brain is not an enjoyable situation.”

Like his boss, the Captain thinks we are on the cusp of being immersed in a virtual world akin to lucid dreaming or the Star Trek holodeck, “where you start with a blank room and you are transported to a whole world of all the senses.”

Just as we had to be dragged into acknowledging that sound and color made movies more realistic, now we must get accustomed to films where, with apologies to a colleague, the world is not flat.

Here’s her flat earth colleague, The Moustache of Wisdom, who is in Sana, Yemen:

I took part in a “qat chew” the other day at the home of a Yemeni official. Never done that before. Qat is the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work — and sometimes during. My hosts insisted that qat actually makes your senses sharper and that you could chew and chisel the top of a mosque minaret at the same time. I quit after 15 minutes, but the Yemeni officials, lawmakers and businessmen I was with chewed on for three hours — and they made a lot of sense along the way.

Most had been educated in America or had kids studying there, and they were all bemoaning how the decline of the Yemeni education system, the proliferation of exclusively religious schools here and the falloff in scholarships for Yemeni kids to study in America were producing a very different Yemeni generation than their own. They spoke fondly of U.S. schools that were based on merit, taught them to think freely and prepared them with the skills to thrive.

So here is my new rule of thumb: For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.

If we stick to something close to that ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens, we have a chance to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground. Because right now there are some 300,000 college-educated Yemenis out of work — partly because of poor training and partly because there are no jobs — 15,000 schoolchildren not attending any classes, 65 percent of teachers with only high school degrees and thousands of kids learning little more than religious doctrines.

And no wonder. Beginning in the 1970s, the trend in Yemen, Morocco, Egypt and the Persian Gulf “was to Islamicize education as a way to fight the left and pro-communists — with the blessing of the U.S.,” explained Lahcen Haddad, a professor at the University of Rabat in Morocco and an expert on governance with Management Systems International, a U.S. development contractor. Then, in 1979, after the Saudi ruling family was shaken by an attack in Mecca from its own Wahabi fundamentalists, the Saudi regime, to fend off the anger of its Wahabis, “gave them free rein to Islamicize education and social life in Saudi Arabia and neighboring states.”

“Missions — cultural and religious, semi-official and private — roamed Islamic countries to spread the word,” said Haddad. “Cheap books followed, and students were brought to Saudi to learn from Wahabi preachers and teachers in the different religious universities that mushroomed in the ’80s.”

Small, economically deprived Yemen was an easy target. Uncritically accepting of the “truths” of Wahabism became the core curriculum in many Yemeni schools, Haddad added, and “it destroyed the opportunity to build the basic skills necessary to train the right labor force — skills like problem-solving, communication, critical thinking, debate, organization and teamwork.”

America’s last great ideological foe, Soviet Marxism, produced its share of violent radicals, but it also produced Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — because it believed in science, physics, math and the classics of literature. Islamism is not producing any Sakharovs.

May Yamani, the author and daughter of the former Saudi oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani, minced no words, writing in The Beirut Daily Star: “Saudi Arabia exported both its Wahabism and Al Qaeda to Yemen by funding thousands of madrassas, where fanaticism is taught.”

Ahmed Sofan, a Yemeni parliamentarian, told me that back in the 1970s if you visited a village in his rural constituency, most of the women would be unveiled and working alongside the men. No more, he said, “because we now have this Wahabi sense of religious conservatism where women are supposed to be inside and be veiled.”

Added Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a former prime minister: Growing up, “we studied Darwinism in my high school without challenge.” Not anymore. “The East Asian miracle,” he added, “wasn’t possible without women. In the Arab world, if half our society is excluded, how will we ever catch up with those new tigers?”

The Yemeni journalist Mohammed al-Qadhi reported in The National newspaper that there may be 10,000 religious-based schools educating Yemeni youth today. He quoted a top Yemeni education official as saying, “We are now obliging these schools to teach moderation to protect our students against extremism.”

In other words, we are now fighting for the Middle East of the 2020s and 2030s. Huge chunks of this generation are lost. When I went to see Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, at his Sana palace, he was in a reflective mood: “I would wish that this arms race could end and instead we could have a race for development.”

It is the only way Yemen will have a future. So, yes, fire those Predators where we must, but help build schools and fund scholarships to America wherever we can. And please, please, let’s end our addiction to oil, which is what gives the Saudi religious ministry and charities the money to spread anti-modernist thinking across this region.

Brooks, Cohen and Herbert

Bobo has labored and has produced an opus titled “The House of Tranquility” in which he states that Barack Obama and Joe Biden once had a Felix and Oscar air about them. But in recent months, Obama has found a way to use Biden’s skills, while Biden has found ways to be of use.  Mr. Cohen, in “The World’s Watchmaker,” says China has America about where it wants it. You can make your own calculation of President Obama’s leverage over Beijing — and it’s heading south.  Mr. Herbert addresses “The Worst of the Pain,” and says those in the lower-income groups are in a much, much deeper hole than the general commentary on the recession would lead people to believe.  Here’s Bobo:

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and Joe Biden had a Felix and Oscar air about them. Obama was disciplined and professorial while Biden was tactile and approachable. Biden would make an off-color joke, while Obama would put on a contemptuous grimace. Biden would bound friskily onstage to the roar of the crowd. Obama would glide gracefully and even ask Joe to hold his coat.

It was not automatic that the two men would work well together once in office. When advisers from the Obama campaign interviewed Biden as a potential running mate and asked him why he wanted to be vice president, he told them that, in fact, he didn’t want the job. He’d do it. But he didn’t want it.

And, indeed, Biden’s first few months on the job were not entirely happy. He went off on one of his gaffe sprees, angering White House aides. It was common to hear Democratic senators say, “Joe is miserable. He’s doing this for the country, but he’s miserable.”

It was odd to interview him then. Normally a verbal gusher, his word rate diminished to a trickle. He paused and hemmed, like a man crossing a minefield.

But in recent months, Obama has found a way to use Biden’s skills, while Biden has found ways to be of use.

A big moment came when the subject of Iraq came up at a security meeting. Obama casually asked Biden to take the lead on Iraqi policy. This was a potentially dangerous moment in which the vice president could be tromping over ground occupied by the secretaries of state and defense. But Biden seems to know every player in Iraq down to the alderman level — and, so far, he seems to have done the job without stepping on too many toes. (Hillary Clinton’s influence on this and all issues is exceptionally hard to figure out.)

Biden also was asked to oversee the stimulus spending, a job that occupies 20 percent of his time. He has spoken to 49 governors and 100 mayors successfully policing the spending splurge and heading off potentially damaging stimulus projects, like a Napa wine train that would have shepherded tipplers from one vineyard to another.

Finally, Biden was asked to come up with a middle-class agenda. This is a surprisingly difficult job because many of these programs — credits for college affordability and child care — fairly reek of Clintonism. This is an administration that is staffed by Clintonites but does not want to appear Clintonian in any way.

Biden, for his part, has become the country’s leading Obama-ologist. Dick Cheney never spoke at meetings. Biden has his weekly presidential lunches, as Cheney did, but he does speak at meetings, depending on the president’s body language.

There are times when the president is leaning back when he seems to relish Biden’s interventions. During the Afghan debate, the president clearly used the vice president to push the skeptic’s case.

On other occasions, when the president doesn’t seem to have made up his mind, or when he is leaning forward, hunched over the table, Biden holds back, letting the arguments play.

Inside the administration, in other words, Biden doesn’t have the class-clown reputation that he has on the late-night comedy shows. White House aides speak of him respectfully and regularly mention his role when decisions are made. Among other things, he has emerged as the special assistant for body English — sent to Capitol Hill, Poland and beyond — when the administration needs somebody to hold a hand and show empathy.

The surprisingly smooth relationship between the administration’s top two officers is part of the broader White House culture. This is a fraught political climate. Liberals are furious. Moderates are running for their lives. Republicans believe, with much evidence, that an unprecedented wave of public rage is breaking across the land, directed at Washington. The uninformed float rumors that Rahm Emanuel is on the outs.

Yet the atmosphere in the White House appears surprisingly tranquil. Emanuel is serving as a lighting rod for the president but remains crisply confident in his role as chief of staff. It’s true that several top administration officials did not want to attempt comprehensive health care reform this year. But they are not opening recrimination campaigns. It’s no secret that many think the president needs to be more assertive with Congress, yet administration officials still talk about Obama in awestruck tones, even in private.

Some would say the administration is underreacting to the incredible shift in the public mood. Some would say they need more voices from the great unwashed. But no one could accuse them of panicking, or of scrambling about incoherently. In their first winter of discontent, they are offering continuity and comity. Whatever their relations with the country might be, inside they seem unruffled. The bonds of association, from the top down, seem healthy — especially for a bunch of Democrats.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I’ve been thinking about Eddie Leung. He had lunch with me the other day at his factory in Dongguan, China, and appeared wearing a black yarmulke. “All my friends are Jewish,” he said.

Leung’s a good salesman, charming guy. He makes watches, about 1.5 million pieces a year. He makes sterling silver watches for the QVC home shopping network and watches with the famous crocodile emblem for Lacoste. He makes Juicy Couture’s hot young line.

Tommy Hilfiger, Jennifer Lopez, Coach, Titan, Trump — name the brand and Leung is manufacturing their watches in China’s southern Guangdong Province, the place that is now the world’s factory.

Leung was wearing a great hulk of a watch called a Bonja. It’s big in Gulf states, where it retails for about $4,000. Leung told me he’s paid $200 for this model and that leaves him a comfortable margin. For Juicy Couture watches that retail in New York for $95, he gets eight dollars. He’s still making money on that. In general he receives about 8 percent of the retail price, or about 40 bucks for a $495 Lacoste watch.

That’s called working the nuts and bolts of the high end. His company, Dailywin Watch Products, has been doing that since 1978.

Interesting work, Leung’s, for several reasons, one being how it illustrates the power of branding. Develop a cool brand and you can charge a crazy mark-up. Even for a product like a watch that nobody needs any more. Every electronic device from a basic cellphone up tells the time. So a watch is now redundant, no more than a fashion accessory.

It’s thriving in that role. You can be all-American like Hilfiger, or very French like Lacoste. Then you get China to develop that image at low cost. Authenticity is fungible in a world where Chinese men wear yarmulkes. (An affectation that Leung said draws a laugh from his New York clients.)

The quality here is not Swiss, but it’s high — “we are at 85 to 90 percent of the quality of Swiss made,” said Matthew She, the general manager. As a longtime U.S. resident of southern China put it: “Does America have a choice of a cheaper place for a quality product?”

Short answer: nope. China has the United States about where it wants it. You can make your own calculation of President Obama’s leverage over Beijing — and it’s heading south.

The average worker at Dailywin earns about $150 to $200 a month, before overtime, ranging higher for supervisors. About 70 percent of the more than 400 workers are women, many from inland provinces, living six to a room in on-premise dormitories and sending their earnings home.

I found conditions in the factory good — clean, a groomed garden, a large canteen. I also found Leung, for all his bonhomie, in a pensive mood. It’s been a rough 18 months in Dongguan since the Great Recession began. About two million jobs have been lost in the region, including a few hundred at Dailywin. Countless factories have closed.

Leung said his sales last year were down more than 20 percent over 2008, with the sharpest drop (over 40 percent) in January 2009. After a decade of smooth expansion, this was a shock. He’s had to slash costs. Labor and raw materials are becoming more expensive. Above all, Western consumers have taken a deep breath: “Now, you don’t just buy, you are looking for quality or real necessity, or you won’t spend.”

So, I asked Leung, given all these difficulties, what do you think of Obama’s demands that China revalue its currency, the renminbi, or yuan, which America thinks is undervalued, placing the United States, in the president’s words, “at a huge competitive disadvantage?”

Leung laughed. He’s a friend of Obama’s half-brother, who lives nearby, and he wishes the president well. But business is business. “Look,” he said. “Too much of that and we lose. Even a 3 percent appreciation is not good for me. Nations act in their self-interest. If President Hu Jintao told Obama to adjust the dollar because it would be good for the world, would he do that?”

The low renminbi rate is about growth, jobs and exports. That’s the fundamental underpinning of the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power. China came through the downturn but, as Dailywin’s difficulties suggest, it did not come through unscathed. Jobs were lost, painful adjustments made. I don’t see China risking its renewed growth to cool U.S. Congressional ire over high American unemployment.

Leung’s got to sell his watches. All the ships carrying America’s toilet paper and aluminum foil and disposable razor blades through the Pearl River Delta — Guangdong Province alone accounts for over a third of U.S.-China trade — have to keep sailing or there will be unacceptable political risk. Exports still drive 9 percent annual growth, whatever the development of the domestic market.

A dollar at 6.83 yuan keeps Chinese-made global brands with their colossal mark-ups in the global mall. That’s an imperative even mighty America battles in vain. Which is why Eddie Leung’s time is not about to run out.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

There is a great tendency in this country to refuse to see what is right in front of everybody’s eyes.

While there is now, finally, a great deal of talk among the politicians and in the news media about unemployment, there is still almost a willful refusal to focus on just who is suffering the most from joblessness and underemployment.

When it comes to employment, there are roughly three broad categories in the United States. The folks in the upper-income group are not suffering much, if at all, from the profound reversals in employment brought about by the Great Recession. Those in the middle have been hit hard. The job losses there have been severe and long-lasting. But for those in the lower-income groups, the scale of the employment crisis has been mind-boggling.

What you’re not hearing from the politicians and the talking heads is that the joblessness and underemployment in America’s low-income households rival their heights in the Great Depression of the 1930s — and in some instances are worse. The same holds true for some categories of blue-collar workers. Anyone who thinks this devastating problem is going away soon, or that the economy can be put back on track without addressing it, is deluded.

There has been talk about income inequality over the past several years, but what is happening now is catastrophic. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston divided American households into 10 groups based on annual household income. Then it analyzed labor conditions in each of the groups during the fourth quarter of 2009.

The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.

Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.

The next lowest group, with incomes of $12,500 to $20,000, had an unemployment rate of 19.1 percent.

These are the kinds of jobless rates that push families already struggling on meager incomes into destitution. And such gruesome gaps in the condition of groups at the top and bottom of the economic ladder are unmistakable signs of impending societal instability. This is dangerous stuff. Nothing good can come of vast armies of the unemployed just sitting out there, simmering.

When the data about underemployment is factored in — meaning individuals who are working part time but would like to work full time, and those who have stopped looking but would take a job if one were available — the picture only worsens. In the lowest group, the underemployment rate was 20.6 percent, compared with just 1.6 percent in the highest group.

The people suffering the most drastic employment reversals in this recession have been those who were in the lower-income groups to begin with — the young, less well-educated workers, especially black and Hispanic high school dropouts, and certain categories of service workers, such as food preparers and building cleaners. Blue-collar workers were also hammered, especially those in the construction industry.

This is not to say that the middle class has not been hurt badly by the recession. It has been. In last year’s fourth quarter, the group with household incomes of $40,000 to $49,000 had a jobless rate of 9 percent, close to the disastrous national average. The $50,000 to $59,000 group had a 7.8 percent jobless rate, and households earning $60,000 to $75,000 had a jobless rate of 6.4 percent.

The point here is that those in the lower-income groups are in a much, much deeper hole than the general commentary on the recession would lead people to believe. And none of the policy prescriptions being offered by the administration or the leaders of either party in Congress would in any way substantially alleviate the plight of those groups.

We talk about the recession as if all of its victims were suffering equally, and all will be helped by some bland, class-and-category-neutral solution.

That is so wrong. As the Center for Labor Market Studies explained in its report: “A true labor market depression faced those in the bottom two deciles of the income distribution; a deep labor market recession prevailed among those in the middle of the distribution, and close to a full employment environment prevailed at the top.”

Those who believe this grievous economic situation will right itself of its own accord or can be corrected without bold, targeted (and, yes, expensive) government action are still reading from the Ronald Reagan (someday it will trickle down) hymnal.

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

This is rich.  The Pasty Little Putz is calling the president naïve.  In “The Dream of Zero” the asshole says that linking the antiproliferation agenda to the dream of universal nuclear abolition, as President Obama seems intent on doing, is a naïve approach a very difficult problem.  I’m sure that he’s devoted most of his 30 years to studying this.  Well, when he wasn’t busy being a film critic, a Republican strategist and a religious scold…  Prof. Krugman says “America Is Not Yet Lost,” and that the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government, and senators should change the rules to end obstructionism.  Here’s that hopeless putz, who’s in Munich:

In many ways, Barack Obama has taken a more cold-eyed approach to foreign affairs than George W. Bush. He’s emphasized realism over human rights, negotiation over regime change, the national interest over the promotion of democracy.

But there’s been one great exception to this realpolitik revival: the realm of nuclear strategy.

There Obama has been all about idealism. His speeches have committed the U.S. to the pursuit of a “world without nuclear weapons,” and linked the fight against proliferation to the goal of total nuclear abolition. His policy priorities have included a new arms control agreement with the Russians, the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a Nuclear Posture Review, to be released next month, that may limit both the size of the American arsenal and the circumstances it which it could be used. Two decades after the end of the cold war, Obama has put the dream of disarmament back on America’s agenda.

The world has noticed. Last week in Paris, the antinuclear “Global Zero” movement staged its coming-out party, with a summit meeting and keynote speech by George Shultz, the former U.S. secretary of state and a late-in-life convert to the cause of abolition. And over the weekend, the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of global power players, convened a panel on the question, “Is Zero Possible?” The panelists, who included former defense officials from Russia, India and Germany, as well as Senator John Kerry, answered unanimously in the affirmative.

It’s doubtful that they all believed it. But the fact that they felt obliged to offer lip service to the ideal of disarmament marks an important victory for Obama, and for the antinuclear cause.

The only question is whether this is good news for global security.

Certainly the United States has room to reduce its nuclear arsenal. As an aspirational flourish amid our negotiations with the Russians, a nod toward the dream of a nuclear-free world may be harmless enough.

But the argument for chasing “Global Zero” can also turn dangerously naïve. This is particularly true of the conceit, touted by Obama, that by reducing or eliminating our nuclear stockpiles, we can dissuade other nations from pursuing nuclear weapons of their own.

In reality, the reverse is likely true. The American nuclear arsenal doesn’t encourage local arms races; it forestalls them. Remove our nuclear umbrella from the North Pacific, and South Korea and Japan would feel compelled to go nuclear in a hurry. If Iran gets the bomb, the protections afforded by American missiles may be the only way to prevent nuclearization in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. (In the panel immediately following the “Is Zero Possible?” colloquy, the Turkish foreign minister declared that his country has no need of nuclear arms — because, he quickly added, “we are part of the NATO umbrella, so that is sufficient.”)

The notion that lesser powers only want nuclear weapons because the United States has so many reflects a peculiar kind of American provincialism. In reality, nuclearization is usually driven by regional concerns — from India’s rivalry with Pakistan to Israel’s fear of Middle Eastern encirclement. So is disarmament, when it happens: South Africa gave up its nuclear capability only after it gave up apartheid, and Brazil and Argentina dropped their nascent programs as part of a broader march toward regional détente.

Moreover, even when the fear of American power is a factor in a country’s quest for W.M.D., the fear of our nuclear weapons usually isn’t. Saddam Hussein wasn’t chasing fissile material because he thought the United States would drop an ICBM on Baghdad. For rogue states, the bomb is an obvious way to offset America’s enormous conventional military advantage — and this will hold true no matter how low our nuclear stockpiles go.

This doesn’t mean that America shouldn’t enter into reasonable arms control agreements. But linking the antiproliferation agenda to the dream of universal abolition makes an already difficult problem even harder to solve.

It’s precisely because the proliferation problem is so difficult, though, that the “Global Zero” movement can feel superficially appealing. The Munich nuclear-abolition panel took place just 24 hours before Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ordered his scientists to forge ahead with uranium enrichment. Faced with yet another round of Iranian brinkmanship, you can understand why Western leaders might prefer to talk about a world without nuclear weapons. By making the issue bigger, more long-term and more theoretical, they can almost make it seem to go away.

But when it comes to containing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the existing American arsenal simply isn’t part of the problem. And if Iran does acquire the bomb, our nuclear deterrent will quickly become an important part of the solution.

I’m not going to say anything about Munich or history or beer.  Nope.  No way.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Ms. Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94 to 2. But Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.

This dubious achievement may have inspired Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama. In any case, Mr. Shelby has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.

What gives individual senators this kind of power? Much of the Senate’s business relies on unanimous consent: it’s difficult to get anything done unless everyone agrees on procedure. And a tradition has grown up under which senators, in return for not gumming up everything, get the right to block nominees they don’t like.

In the past, holds were used sparingly. That’s because, as a Congressional Research Service report on the practice says, the Senate used to be ruled by “traditions of comity, courtesy, reciprocity, and accommodation.” But that was then. Rules that used to be workable have become crippling now that one of the nation’s major political parties has descended into nihilism, seeing no harm — in fact, political dividends — in making the nation ungovernable.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that I miss Newt Gingrich.

Readers may recall that in 1995 Mr. Gingrich, then speaker of the House, cut off the federal government’s funding and forced a temporary government shutdown. It was ugly and extreme, but at least Mr. Gingrich had specific demands: he wanted Bill Clinton to agree to sharp cuts in Medicare.

Today, by contrast, the Republican leaders refuse to offer any specific proposals. They inveigh against the deficit — and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes. But they also denounce anything that might actually reduce the deficit, including, ironically, any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely.

And with the national G.O.P. having abdicated any responsibility for making things work, it’s only natural that individual senators should feel free to take the nation hostage until they get their pet projects funded.

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis. But by now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: it goes straight for the capillaries. Sure enough, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, accused Mr. Shelby of “silliness.” Yep, that will really resonate with voters.

After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually — after the country’s post-World War I resurrection — became the country’s national anthem. It begins, “Poland is not yet lost.”

Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

In “A Scrubbed Toe in the Race” MoDo says that Harold Ford Jr., the transplant with the Tennessee driver’s license who was raised in Washington, D.C., professes that he loves, loves, loves, loves New York.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Sana, Yemen and sends us “A Postcard From Yemen.”  He says Sana is not Kabul, and Yemen is not Afghanistan — not yet. Yeminis have the resources to save themselves, but they need to be mobilized by better governance.  Mr. Kristof, in “The World Capital of Killing,” says that Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation in ways that sear the survivors of a war that appears to have claimed more lives than the Holocaust.  Mr. Rich suggests that we “Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet,” and says after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military, a curious silence befell the right.  Here’s MoDo:

Between bites of an egg-white garden omelet at a bistro in his Union Square neighborhood, Harold Ford Jr. defended himself on pedicures and flip-flops.

“I either run or try to play basketball every day,” he said. “I have severe athlete’s foot — feet. I get a foot scrub out of respect for my wife because getting into bed with what I have when I take my socks off isn’t respectful to anybody.”

Ford had worked out at Equinox and was dressed in a University of Michigan baseball cap and T-shirt, J. Crew sweatshirt, Adidas striped pants and Nike tennis shoes.

The New York transplant with the Tennessee driver’s license who was raised in Washington, D.C., is the darling of what he calls the “Manhattan social philanthropic crowd.”

As the former Tennessee congressman and Merrill Lynch rainmaker told The Times’s Michael Barbaro in an interview about his flirtation with a Senate run, he gets pedicures and has breakfast at the Regency on Park Avenue (where Rielle Hunter famously picked up John Edwards by calling him “so hot”). He often gets chauffeured by MSNBC to his gigs on “Morning Joe” and has flown to the boroughs in a helicopter.

The chopper trip was part of a fundraising drive by the New York City Police Foundation.

He said he and his brothers were not spoiled growing up. “My grandmother beat the [expletive] out of us with an electric cord,” he said.

“Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand and some others want to create this notion that I moved to New York with the intention of running for office and I live this unbelievably luxurious life,” he said, his green eyes earnest. “I’m blessed, and I work extremely hard, and I’m able to pay my bills. I love New York. I love the smell of the city. I love the subways. As I learn more and more, I love every part of the state. It’s so unfair how it’s been characterized. I eat at places like the Coffee Shop more than I eat uptown.”

We had stopped in the Coffee Shop before deciding that, despite its greasy-spoon name, it was a hub of hip, too noisy for an interview.

Ford said he and his pretty blond wife, Emily, a marketing expert, were married in 2008 after his racially charged run for the Senate in Tennessee. They have made her apartment their official home.

“My wife decided after the ’08 election,” he said. “There was so much bad racial stuff out of Tennessee on Obama. I’m in an interracial marriage. I don’t want to subject my wife to this, and I want to start a family. I think my marriage is more accepted here than it would be in Tennessee. I started paying closer attention to New York politics, and I was pleasantly — not pleasantly — but I was surprised by how serious the New York political class were in their opposition to Senator Gillibrand.”

Being a Wall Street bonus baby is not a plus. “I’m not running from the fact that I worked at a bank and brought in clients,” he said. “Am I proud of everything that went on? Of course not.”

But Ford was helped by Gillibrand Svengali Schumer and the White House — the “political bosses,” as he calls them — shoving him away from the race. He also sees Scott Brown as a happy harbinger that 2010 is going to be, in the words of an Obama adviser, “a rancid year for incumbents.”

“I’m not comparing myself to Bobby Kennedy by any stretch, but he was opposed by the liberal establishment, too,” Ford said. “Eleanor Roosevelt was the biggest opponent to him running.”

He argues that politicians should not have “static positions” but should “allow new information and cultural norms to affect them.” They should not, he said, be punished for “thoughtfulness.”

On his embrace of gay marriage, he observed: “There were pastors in my Tennessee district who said you can minister to someone and change their sexual orientation. I just never accepted that. I’m a heterosexual. I don’t know what anyone can say to me to make me sexually be with a man.”

There are top Democrats who find Ford too slick. “He could sell a snowball in a blizzard,” said one.

But he has a buttery way that suits brash New York. He charms everyone, from waiters who drop cutlery to customers who drop into his conversation.

“People walk right over and grab your hand, and they never say, ‘Pardon me,’ which I love,” he said. “My dad was a congressman, and he taught me at a very early age, ‘They voted for me, they view me as theirs, and I am.’ Our family’s phone in Memphis was always listed. It rang all day and all night.”

The guy at the next table was staring at Ford’s plate. “The garden omelet,” Ford said, with a grin.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Yemen’s former prime minister, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, got right to the point when I arrived at his Sana home for dinner: “So, Thomas, did it take Abdulmutallab to finally get you here?” Yes, it is true, I admitted, because that young Nigerian, trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda, tried to blow up a Northwest jetliner on Christmas Day, I decided I had to see Yemen firsthand. I further confessed to Iryani: “I was a bit worried coming here. I half expected to be met at the bottom of the stairs from my Qatar Airways flight by Osama bin Laden himself.”

Fortunately, though, I found that Sana is not Kabul, and Yemen is not Afghanistan — not yet. The Walled Old City of Sana, a U.N. World Heritage site with its mud-brick buildings adorned with geometric shapes, was bustling with coffee shops at night and vendors by day. Walking through its streets with a Yemeni friend, we came upon four bearded, elderly Yemeni men — traditional daggers tucked into their belts — discussing a poster taped to a stone wall urging “fathers and mothers” to send their girls to school. When I asked what they thought of that idea, the oldest said he was “ready to give up part of a meal each day so that my girls can learn to read.” Moreover, he added, the poster had just fallen down and he had just taped it back up for others to see. Not what I expected.

Nor did I expect to find civil society organizations here staffed with young American volunteers — and, in the case of The Yemen Observer, an English-language newspaper, a whole newsroom full of them. All I could do was look around at these American college students and wonder: “Do your parents know you’re here?” They just laughed. Every shopkeeper I spoke to in Old Sana spat out the words “Al Qaeda,” which they blamed for killing tourism. Who knew Yemen had tourists? No, this is not Afghanistan.

But this ain’t Denmark, either.

Al Qaeda is like a virus. When it appears en masse, it indicates something is wrong with a country’s immune system. And something is wrong with Yemen’s. A weak central government in Sana rules over a patchwork of rural tribes, using an ad hoc system of patronage, co-optation, corruption and force. Vast areas of the countryside remain outside government control, particularly in the south and east, where 300 to 500 Qaeda fighters have found sanctuary. This “Yemeni Way” has managed to hold the country together and glacially nudge it forward, despite separatist movements in the North and the South. But that old way and pace of doing things can no longer keep pace with the negative trends.

Consider a few numbers: Yemen’s population growth rate is close to 3.5 percent, one of the highest in the world, with 50 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people under the age of 15 and 75 percent under 29. Unemployment is 35 to 40 percent, in part because Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states booted out a million Yemeni workers after Yemen backed Saddam Hussein in the 1990 gulf war.

Thanks to bad planning and population growth, Yemen could be the first country to run out of water in 10 to 15 years. Already many Yemenis experience interrupted water service, like electricity blackouts, which they also have constantly. In the countryside today, women sometimes walk up to four hours a day to find a working well. The water table has fallen so low in Sana that you need oil-drilling equipment to find it. This isn’t helped by the Yemeni tradition of chewing qat, a mild hallucinogenic leaf drug, the cultivation of which consumes 40 percent of Yemen’s water supply each year.

Roughly 65 percent of Yemeni schoolteachers have only high school degrees. Most people live on less than $2 a day — except those who don’t. A Rolls Royce was recently sold in Sana for the first time. More than 70 percent of government income comes from dwindling oil exports, while 70 percent of Yemenis are illiterate and 15 percent of kids are not in school.

Yet, at the same time, this country has some of the most interesting journalists, social activists and politicians I have met in the Arab world. I spent a morning at the Media Women Forum, an N.G.O. that trains Yemeni female journalists and promotes press freedom — part of the “young guard” of idealistic Yemeni reformers who want to serve their people but, so far, have not really been empowered by the old leadership. Founded by a Yemeni press-freedom sparkplug, Rahma Hugaira, the office was bustling with girls, whose hunger to speak their minds filtered right through the black robes that covered all but their eyes.

It’s not a secret how to fix this country, argued Mohammed al-Asaadi, a media consultant who sat in with us: “We need a revolution against the status quo. We need to build capacity, institutionalize the rule of law and build a culture of ownership and responsibility.” Added Murad Hashim, the Al Jazeera bureau chief here: “We need more education, but we have not used our educated people.” Indeed, Yemen has the resources to save itself, but they need to be mobilized by better governance. Without that, the trend lines will eventually overwhelm everything and the Qaeda virus, still controllable, will spread.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof, who is still in Bukavu, Congo:

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she moved in with her uncle.

A few months later, the extremist Hutu militia invaded the home. She remembers that it was the day of her very first menstrual period — the only one she has ever had.

“First, they tied up my uncle,” Jeanne said. “They cut off his hands, gouged out his eyes, cut off his feet, cut off his sex organs, and left him like that. He was still alive.

“His wife and his son were also there. Then they took all of us into the forest.” That militia is known for kidnapping people and enslaving them for months, even years. Men are turned into porters, and girls into sex slaves.

Jeanne and other girls were regularly tied spread-eagle and gang-raped, and she soon became pregnant. The rapes continued, sometimes with sticks that tore apart her insides and left her dribbling wastes constantly. Somehow the fetus survived, but her pelvis was too immature to deliver the baby.

One of the people the militia had kidnapped was a doctor who was forced to treat the soldiers. The doctor, seeing that Jeanne was close to dying in obstructed childbirth, cut her open with an old knife, without anesthetic, and removed the stillborn baby. Jeanne was delirious and almost dead, so the militia dumped her beside a road.

“She was completely destroyed inside,” said another doctor, Denis Mukwege, who saved her life after she was brought here to Bukavu. Dr. Mukwege, 54, presides over the 400-bed Panzi Hospital, supported by the European Union and private groups like the Fistula Foundation. He is sometimes mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic efforts to fight the war and heal its victims.

Dr. Mukwege operated on Jeanne nine times over three years to repair the fistulas that were causing her to leak wastes. Finally he succeeded, and she returned to her village to live with her grandmother.

“He told me to stay away from men for three months,” Jeanne remembers, to give her body time to heal. But three days after she returned to the village, the militia came again and raped again. The fistula reopened.

Jeanne, kept naked in the forest and stinking because her internal injuries had reopened, finally managed to escape and eventually found her way back to Panzi Hospital. Dr. Mukwege has already started a second round of surgeries on her, but there is so little tissue left that it is not clear she can ever be continent again.

About 12 percent of the raped women he treats have contracted syphilis, and 6 percent have H.I.V. He does what he can to repair their injuries and help them heal — until the next time.

“Sometimes I don’t know what I am doing here,” Dr. Mukwege said despairingly. “There is no medical solution.” The paramount need, he says, is not for more humanitarian aid for Congo, but for a much more vigorous international effort to end the war itself.

That means putting pressure on neighboring Rwanda, a country so widely admired for its good governance at home that it tends to get a pass for its possible role in war crimes next door. We also need pressure on the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to arrest Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. And, as recommended by an advocacy organization called the Enough Project, we need a U.S.-brokered effort to monitor the minerals trade from Congo so that warlords can no longer buy guns by exporting gold, tin or coltan.

Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo — fueled by profits from mineral exports — will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?

Last but not least here’s Mr. Rich:

A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.

John McCain, commandeering the spotlight as usual, did fulminate against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the press focus on McCain, the crazy man in Washington’s attic, was misleading. His yapping was an exception, not the rule.

Many of his Republican colleagues said little or nothing. The right’s noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in the Hannity-O’Reilly hothouse of prime time that night. Only ratings-desperate CNN gave a fleeting platform to the old homophobic clichés. Michael O’Hanlon, an “expert” from the Brookings Institution, speculated that “18-year-old, old-fashioned, testosterone-laden” soldiers who are “tough guys” might object to those practicing “alternative forms of lifestyle,” which he apparently views as weak and testosterone-deficient. His only prominent ally was the Family Research Council, which issued an inevitable “action alert” demanding a stop to “the sexualization of our military.”

The occasional outliers notwithstanding, why did such a hush greet Mullen on Capitol Hill? The answer begins with the simple fact that a large majority of voters — between 61 percent and 75 percent depending on the poll — now share his point of view. Most Americans recognize that being gay is not a “lifestyle” but an immutable identity, and that outlawing discrimination against gay people who want to serve their country is, as the admiral said, “the right thing to do.”

Mullen’s heartfelt, plain-spoken testimony gave perfect expression to the nation’s own slow but inexorable progress on the issue. He said he had “served with homosexuals since 1968” and that his views had evolved “cumulatively” and “personally” ever since. So it has gone for many other Americans in all walks of life. As more gay people have come out — a process that accelerated once the modern gay rights movement emerged from the Stonewall riots of 1969 — so more heterosexuals have learned that they have gay relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers and co-workers. It is hard to deny our own fundamental rights to those we know, admire and love.

But that’s not the whole explanation for the scant pushback in Washington to Mullen and his partner in change, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. There is also a potent political subtext. To a degree unimaginable as recently as 2004 — when Karl Rove and George W. Bush ran a national campaign exploiting fear of gay people — there is now little political advantage to spewing homophobia. Indeed, anti-gay animus is far more likely to repel voters than attract them. This equation was visibly eating at Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah, as he vamped nervously with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC last week, trying to duck any discernible stand on Mullen’s testimony. On only one point was he crystal clear: “I just plain do not believe in prejudice of any kind.”

Now that explicit anti-gay animus is an albatross, those who oppose gay civil rights are driven to invent ever loopier rationales for denying those rights, whether in the military or in marriage. Hatch, for instance, limply suggested to Mitchell that a repeal of “don’t ask” would lead to gay demands for “special rights.” Such arguments, both preposterous and disingenuous, are mere fig leaves to disguise the phobia that can no longer dare speak its name. If gay Americans are to be granted full equality, the flimsy rhetorical camouflage must be stripped away to expose the prejudice that lies beneath.

The arguments for preserving “don’t ask” have long been blatantly groundless. McCain — who said in 2006 that he would favor repealing the law if military leaders ever did — didn’t even bother to offer a logical explanation for his mortifying flip-flop last week. He instead huffed that the 1993 “don’t ask” law should remain unchanged as long as any war is going on (which would be in perpetuity, given Afghanistan). Colin Powell strafed him just hours later, when he announced that changed “attitudes and circumstances” over the past 17 years have led him to agree with Mullen. McCain is even out of step with his own family’s values. Both his wife, Cindy, and his daughter Meghan have posed for the current California ad campaign explicitly labeling opposition to same-sex marriage as hate.

McCain aside, the most common last-ditch argument for preserving “don’t ask” heard last week, largely from Southern senators, is to protect “troop morale and cohesion.” Every known study says this argument is a canard, as do the real-life examples of the many armies with openly gay troops, including those of Canada, Britain and Israel. But the argument does carry a telling historical pedigree. When Harry Truman ordered the racial integration of the American military in 1948, Congressional opponents (then mainly Southern Democrats) embraced an antediluvian Army prediction from 1940 stating that such a change would threaten national defense by producing “situations destructive to morale.” History will sweep this bogus argument away now as it did then.

Those opposing same-sex marriage are just as eager to mask their bigotry. The big arena on that issue is now in California, where the legal showdown over Proposition 8 is becoming a Scopes trial of sorts, with the unlikely bipartisan legal team of David Boies and Ted Olson in the Clarence Darrow role. The opposing lawyer, Charles Cooper, insisted to the court that he bore neither “ill will nor animosity for gays and lesbians.” Given the history of the anti-same-sex marriage camp, it’s hard to make that case with a straight face (so to speak). In trying to do so, Cooper moved that graphic evidence of his side’s ill will and animosity be disallowed — including that notorious, fear-mongering television ad, “The Gathering Storm.”

The judge admitted such exhibits anyway. Boies also triumphed in dismantling an expert witness called to provide the supposedly empirical, non-homophobic evidence of how same-sex marriage threatens “procreative marriage.” In cross-examination, Boies forced the witness, David Blankenhorn of the so-called Institute for American Values, to concede he had no academic expertise in any field related to marriage or family. The only peer-reviewed paper he’s written, for a degree in Comparative Labor History, was “a study of two cabinetmakers’ unions in 19th-century Britain.”

In another, milder cross-examination — on “Meet the Press” last weekend — John Boehner, the House G.O.P. leader, fended off a question about “don’t ask” with a rhetorical question of his own: “In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat, why would we want to get into this debate?” Besides Mullen’s answer — that it is the right thing to do — there’s another, less idealistic reason why President Obama might want to get into it. The debate could blow up in the Republicans’ faces. A protracted battle or filibuster in which they oppose civil rights will end up exposing the deep prejudice at the root of their arguments. That’s not where a party trying to expand beyond its white Dixie base and woo independents wants to be in 2010.

Polls consistently show that independents, however fiscally conservative, are closer to Democrats than Republicans on social issues. (In May’s Gallup survey, 67 percent of independents favored repealing “don’t ask.”) This is why Scott Brown, enjoying what may be a short-lived honeymoon in his own party, calls himself a “Scott Brown Republican.” A Scott Brown Republican isn’t a Boehner or Hatch Republican. In his interview with Barbara Walters last weekend, he distanced himself from Sarah Palin, said he was undecided on “don’t ask” and declared same-sex marriage a “settled” issue in his state, Massachusetts, where it is legal.

It’s in this political context that we can see that there may have been some method to Obama’s troublesome tardiness on gay issues after all. But as we learned about this White House and the Democratic Congress in the health care debacle, they are perfectly capable of dropping the ball at any moment. Let’s hope they don’t this time. Should they actually press forward on “don’t ask” in an election year with Mullen and Gates on board — and with even McCain’s buddy, Joe Lieberman, calling for action “as soon as possible” — they could further the goal and raise the political price for those who stand in the way. Recalcitrant Congressional Republicans will have to explain why their perennial knee-jerk deference to “whatever the commanders want” extends to Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal on troop surges but not to Mullen, who outranks them, on civil rights.

The more bigotry pushed out of the closet for all voters to see, the more likely it is that Americans will be moved to grant overdue full citizenship to gay Americans. It won’t happen overnight, any more than full civil rights for African-Americans immediately followed Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces. But there can be no doubt that Mike Mullen’s powerful act of conscience last week, just as we marked the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter sit-in, pushed history forward. The revealing silence that followed from so many of the usual suspects was pretty golden too.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins, in “No Holds Barred,” says there is a stupendous lack of real enthusiasm in the Senate for doing anything as dramatic as eliminating senators’ right to stop things.  Mr. Blow, in “Obama Gets His Groove Back,” says President Obama’s new sense of vigor comes as a welcome reprieve from a year in which he toddled about as if someone had slipped him an Ambien.  Mr. Herbert says “Time is Running Out,” and that rescuing the U.S. economy will require a commitment, and undoubtedly sacrifices, that need to start now.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Washington was immobilized by snow on Friday. This is highly unusual. Normally, Washington is immobilized by senators.

This time storm warnings came just as the Senate had hit a point of uncommon productivity. In a single week, it managed to not only confirm two U.S. marshals, but also to approve a couple of nominations to the Obama administration. Finally, we can sleep easy in the knowledge that the Labor Department has a No. 3 person.

Then Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama put a hold on the 70-odd other administration nominations that are still pending. Everything came to whatever you call a screeching halt when the vehicle in question was moving at the speed of the Senate.

This was a dramatic gesture, one Shelby must have felt was so important that he took time out from his normal duties blocking all progress on creating a consumer protection agency for financial products.

Normally, a senator who’s feeling testy will just put a hold on one presidential nomination as Jim Bunning of Kentucky did last year when he stopped action on the confirmation of a deputy U.S. trade representative because he was upset that the Canadian Parliament was considering a bill to ban the sale of cigarettes with candy flavorings.

I am not making that up.

Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri had a hold on the nomination of Martha Johnson to be the leader of the General Services Administration since last summer because he was ticked off with the G.S.A. over construction of a new federal building in Kansas City.

The agency kept saying it had responded to Bond’s questions, although perhaps the staff was slow in getting back to him since there was nobody in charge. But Bond held firm until the Democrats forced a vote this week. That naturally involved a great many delays, postponements, overrides and a passionate if incomprehensible speech by Bond, the highlight of which was: “Please bear with me. I know this is confusing.”

Then after many, many months of waiting and several days of total gridlock, Johnson was approved, 96 to 0.

That was a normal Senate procedure. Now Shelby has upped the ante with a blanket hold on everybody. His incredibly grave reasons were the desire to see that a defense contract for a new tanker is awarded to a bidder who will do the assembly work in Alabama. Also, he feels that a new F.B.I. facility for testing explosive devices should be conveniently located in Huntsville.

“If this administration were as worried about hunting down terrorists as it is about the confirmation of low-level political nominations, America would be a safer place,” said a spokesman for the senator.

Yes, indeedy. We’re talking terrorism here, folks. A threat to the American way of life, which guarantees the right of every American senator, no matter how humble or dimwitted, to bring the democratic process to a standstill whenever he or she feels the mood.

O.K., getting a little testy here.

People, can’t we have a citizen revolt over this? It’s all about the filibuster rule. The Obama administration is hamstrung because the Senate now requires 60 votes to get anything done, from health care reform to the confirmation of the woman who’s going to oversee building maintenance. And, of course, in the one piece of business on which the minority party demanded swift action this week, Scott Brown was sworn in as the 41st Republican vote, making it highly unlikely that, in the near-future, even a General Services Administration official is ever going to see the light of day.

“It’s beyond the breaking point,” said Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who plans to introduce a bill to eliminate the filibuster next week.

There is a stupendous lack of real enthusiasm in the Senate for doing anything as dramatic as eliminating the senators’ right to stop things. Some experts think Joe Biden, as presiding officer, could get rid of the filibuster by issuing a ruling when a new Congress assembles next January. The vice president’s office indicated that Biden would be happy to get going on that project the very second hell freezes over.

Which is about the same time the Senate is going to take up Harkin’s bill.

“But I’m hoping we can get enough people interested in this that it becomes an election issue. In Senate races this year, people ought to be asked,” Harkin said.

Harkin has been introducing the same bill since 1995, through lean years and fat for his own party. When his fellow Democrats were in the minority during the Bush years, they were, of course, a lot fonder of the filibuster than they are now.

Back then, it was Republicans who demanded change. “Far too many of the president’s nominees were never afforded an up or down vote because several Democrats chose to block the process for political gain,” complained — um — Richard Shelby.

Hypocrisy in DC?  Who’da thunk it?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Where has this Obama been?

Since the State of the Union address, the president has been bounding about, displaying a new sense of vigor and confidence and a fighter’s spirit. He almost looks like the president people thought that he would be — a paladin, not a pacifist.

Last week, he provided a fascinating bit of political theater by toying with House Republicans at their own retreat, dismantling their arguments and disarming their charges. It was impressive. When they asked if he had time for more questions, he responded: “You know, I’m having fun.” Score.

At his New Hampshire town hall on Tuesday, Obama connected with a more colloquial tone, chiding Republicans for voting against the recovery act while glomming onto the glories of the projects it produced: “They found a way to have their cake and vote against it, too.” Score again.

His new persona comes as a welcome reprieve from a year in which he toddled about as if someone had slipped him an Ambien, taking punches and not returning them.

I have no idea if Nuevo O is here to stay, but I could name a few reasons why it would be a good idea.

1. His base needs a hit.

After months of watching their agenda get mired in misinformation, and after a series of deflating defeats, progressives need a champion, someone to remind them of what it feels like to be on the offensive and not back on their heels. Obama gave them that this week.

2. The bipartisan ship has sailed.

Obama rode into Washington with his heart set on fixing it. Republicans came out with their hearts set on breaking him. Both paths have led to gridlock. This made him appear effete and the Democrats ineffectual.

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama quoted John F. Kennedy’s “civility is not a sign of weakness.” Maybe not, but servility is. There comes a time when one must rise to a fight or fall in defeat. Now is that time.

Besides, no matter how hard he tries, Republicans will not reward his efforts. According to a Fox News poll released on Thursday, only 18 percent of Republicans said they believed that Obama is trying to reach out to Republicans to compromise and change the climate in Washington, and only 14 percent approved of his job performance.

3. Neutrality is a nonstarter.

A study published in The Economic Journal during the summer of 2008 found that voters preferred extreme political positions to moderate ones. It demonstrates a level of commitment and conviction. The lesson: fence-sitting leaves scars, too.

I would advise this new Obama to stick around for a season. I prefer my presidents walking tall, not sleepwalking.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good. The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.

We don’t hear a lot that is serious about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure or the trade policies that crippled so many American industries or our inability (or unwillingness) to compete effectively with China when it comes to the new world of energy for the 21st century or our abject failure to provide a quality public education for the next generation of American workers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.

Speaking at a conference here on Wednesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said that if we don’t act quickly in developing long-term solutions to these and other problems, the United States will be a second-rate economic power by the end of this decade. A failure to act boldly, he said, will result in the U.S. becoming “a cooked goose.”

Neither the politicians nor much of the mainstream media are spelling out the severity of these enormous structural problems or the sense of urgency needed to address them. Living standards are sinking in the United States, and there is no coherent vision or plan for reversing that ominous trend over the long term.

The conference was titled, “The Next American Economy: Transforming Energy and Infrastructure Investment.” It was put together by the Brookings Institution and Lazard, the investment banking advisory firm.

When Governor Rendell addressed the conference on Wednesday, he used words like “stunning” and “unbelievable” to describe what has happened to the nation’s infrastructure. His words echoed the warnings we’ve been hearing for years from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which tells us: “The broken water mains, gridlocked streets, crumbling dams and levees, and delayed flights that come from failing infrastructure have a negative impact on the checkbook and on the quality of life of each and every American.”

The conference was sparked by a sense of dismay over what has happened to the U.S. economy over the past several years and a feeling that constructive ideas about solutions were being smothered by an obsessive focus on the short-term in this society, and by the chronic dysfunction and hyperpartisanship in much of the government.

I was struck by the absence of grousing and finger-pointing at the conference and the emphasis on trying to develop new ways to establish an economy that is not based on financial flimflammery, that enhances America’s competitive position in the world, and that relieves us of the terrible burden of reliance on foreign energy sources.

I was also struck by the pervasive sense that if we don’t get our act together then the glory days of the go-go American economic empire will fade like the triumphs of an aging Hollywood star. One of the participants raised the very real possibility of Americans having to get used to living in an economy “that won’t be number one,” an economy that perhaps is more like Germany’s.

Rescuing the U.S. economy will require a commitment, and undoubtedly sacrifices, that need to start now. And it will require leadership that pulls together the best talents from all sectors of the society — not just business, not just government, but from everywhere.

Bruce Katz, the director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program, discussed some of the steps that need to be taken to remake an economy that has been thrown completely out of whack by frantic, debt-driven consumption, speculative bubbles, exotic financial instruments, and so on.

A new, saner, more sustainable economy will have to be more export-oriented, powered by cleaner fuels, bolstered by innovation that comes from a renewed focus on research and development, and committed to delivering a better-educated, more highly skilled work force.

Mr. Katz believes this is doable, but by no means easy. The nation’s infrastructure, he said, will have to “shift from 20th-century models of transport and energy transmission to rapid bus, ubiquitous broadband, congestion pricing, smart grid, high-speed rail and intelligent transport.”

New ways of financing such transformative changes will have to be developed, linking public and private capital, preferably through the creation of a national infrastructure bank, among other things. The nation’s political leaders and the public at large will have to grasp the difference between wasteful spending and crucial investments in the future.

It’s time for serious people to step forward and help lead on these critically important issues. Time is short.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

Oh, cripes. Bobo’s being a sociologist again.  In “The Sporting Mind” he gurgles about an argument that American moral thinking is a fusion of athletic traditions champions sport culture, but not the spectacle of big-time college games.  It must be silly season.  Mr. Cohen, in “Dog Days in China,” says that there’s nothing rational in the view that it’s weird of the Chinese to eat dog. After all, in the West pet “micro pigs” are becoming fashionable.  Prof. Krugman addresses “Fiscal Scare Tactics” and says fear-mongering on the deficit as part of the Republican political strategy could end up doing as much harm as the fear-mongering on weapons of mass destruction.  Here’s Bobo:

After Hitler came to power, the sociologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy emigrated to the United States.

Rosenstock-Huessy began teaching at Harvard and converted his lectures into English. He noticed, though, that his students weren’t grasping his points. His language was not the problem, it was the allusions. He used literary and other allusions when he wanted to talk about ethics, community, mysticism and emotion. But none of the students seemed to get it. Then, after a few years, he switched to sports analogies. Suddenly, everything clicked.

“The world in which the American student who comes to me at about twenty years of age really has confidence in is the world of sport,” he would write. “This world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affection and interests; therefore, I have built my entire sociology around the experiences an American has in athletics and games.”

Rosenstock-Huessy was not the last academic to recognize that sport organizes the moral thinking of many young Americans. Professor Michael Allen Gillespie of Duke University has just written a fascinating essay, for an anthology called “Debating Moral Education,” on the role of sports in American ethical training.

Throughout Western history, Gillespie argues, there have been three major athletic traditions. First, there was the Greek tradition. Greek sports were highly individualistic. There was little interest in teamwork. Instead sports were supposed to inculcate aristocratic virtues like courage and endurance. They gave individuals a way to achieve eternal glory.

Then, there was the Roman tradition. In ancient Rome, free men did not fight in the arena. Roman sports were a spectacle organized by the government. The free Romans watched while the slaves fought and were slaughtered. The entertainment emphasized the awesome power of the state.

Finally, there was the British tradition. In the Victorian era, elite schools used sports to form a hardened ruling class. Unlike the Greeks, the British placed tremendous emphasis on team play and sportsmanship. If a soccer team committed a foul, it would withdraw its goalie to permit the other team to score. The object was to inculcate a sense of group loyalty, honor and rule-abidingness — traits that were important to a class trying to manage a far-flung empire.

Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British, but think like the Greeks, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.

Gillespie appreciates the way sports culture has influenced American students. It discourages whining, and rewards self-discipline. It teaches self-control and its own form of justice, which has a more powerful effect than anything taught in the classroom.

But, he argues, college sports have become too Romanized. Seasons have become too long and the arenas too gargantuan. Athletes have become a separate gladiator class, and the recruitment process gives them an undue sense of their own worth. Spectators have been reduced to an anonymous mass of passive consumers of other people’s excellence. Coaches have a greater incentive to satisfy the braying crowd with victories than to teach good habits.

Gillespie values sports, in other words, but wants to reform college sports into something smaller and more participatory.

I’m not so sure. I think he misses some of the virtues of big-time college sports.

Several years ago, I arrived in Madison, Wis., for a conference. It was Saturday morning, and as my taxi got close to campus, I noticed people dressed in red walking in the same direction. At first it was a trickle, then thousands. It looked like the gathering of a happy Midwestern cult, though, of course, it was the procession to a football game.

In a segmented society, big-time college sports are one of the few avenues for large-scale communal participation. Mass college sports cross class lines. They induce large numbers of people in a region to stop, at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.

The crowds at big-time college sporting events do not sit passively, the way they do at a movie theater. They roar, suffer and invent chants (especially at Duke basketball games). Mass college sports are the emotional hubs at the center of vast networks of analysis, criticism and conversation. They generate loyalties that are less harmful than ethnic loyalties and emotional morality plays that are at once completely meaningless and totally consuming.

There are the obvious recruiting scandals and greedy coaches, but for all the sins, big-time college sports have become emotional reactors, helping to make university towns vibrant communities. Gillespie is right to appreciate the moral power of sports. But bigness has virtues as well as vices. Big-time college sports are absurd, but we would miss them if they were gone.

Actually, Bobo, millions of us would’t give a shit.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I see the Beckhams, David and Victoria (Posh), have acquired a couple of “micro pigs” as pets and that said pigs (65 pounds when fully grown) are now a fashionable item in Britain, at least among those who can afford a $1,000-plus price tag.

Perhaps Beckham is heeding Churchill, who had a penchant for pigs. The great man’s verdict: “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig. He just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.”

Churchill’s view has some scientific basis. Pigs are smart and sociable. They’ve had a pretty bad rap, however. Two of the world’s great monotheistic religions — Judaism and Islam — prohibit their consumption. Generally, the notion of pigs as pets seems bizarre or repellent.

Why? There’s nothing rational about the view that taking a pig for a walk on a leash is weird, while eating a pork chop, if you so choose, is reasonable. But then, after a visit to China, it seems to me that reason has little or nothing to do with the way we view animals and food.

The Chinese, for example, eat dog (as well as cats, but I’m going to focus on dogs here). They ascribe to dog meat a formidable “warming” quality — the Chinese divide nutrition into “hot” and “cold” elements and seek balance between them — which makes it prized in many regions during winter.

Now, we are appalled in the West at the notion of eating dog while considering it natural to have a dog as a pet — I own a Beagle myself (“Ned”) and I’m very fond of him. This is the inverse of the preponderant Western view of pigs: fine to eat (religious objections aside) but not to pet.

But do pigs have any more or less of a soul than dogs? Are they any more or less sentient? Do they suffer any more or less in death? Are they any more or less part of the mysterious unity of life? I think not.

There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong. However I cannot see a rational argument for saying eating dogs or cats is barbaric while eating pork or beef is fine. If you eat meat you cannot logically find it morally or ethically repugnant to eat a particular meat (I’m setting cannibalism aside here.)

That’s the theory at least. Yet I must confess I’ve been having a hard time. My bout of anguish began a few weeks back on a wintry night in central China, in the restless megalopolis of Chongqing. I was cold, wet and seeking refuge.

“What’s that?” I asked my resourceful interpreter, Xiyun Yang, pointing to a steamy, crowded establishment with a big red neon sign (the Chinese approach is, when in doubt, make it gaudy).

“You don’t want to know.”

“I think I do.”

“It’s a dog restaurant.” It was then that I noticed the image of a puppy with floppy ears beside the Chinese characters.

I gave Xiyun a long, hard look. “Dog’s really good,” she said. “I love it.”

Images of Ned (and his floppy ears) popped into my head, as well as thoughts of what I’d tell my daughter, but I’d come to admire Xiyun’s gastronomic antennae (particularly for Sichuan noodles) and I tend to adhere to the I’ll-try-anything-once school. In we went.

The menu was predictably dog-dominated: dog paws, dog tail, dog brain, dog intestine, even dog penis. We went for a dog broth, simmered for four hours, with Sichuan pepper and ginger. It was warming, with a pepper-tingle. The meat was tender, unctuous, blander than pork, but stronger than chicken. Later, the owner, Chen Zemin, explained how the best dogs for eating had yellow coats, weighed 30 pounds, and did miracles for arthritis.

I’ll take Chen’s word for it. Dog was not easy for me. The memory has proved hard to digest.

As it happened, our meal came shortly before the eruption of a furious online debate in China over a proposed “anti-animal maltreatment” law that would outlaw the eating and selling of dog and cat meat, making it punishable by fines of more than $700 and 15 days of detention.

The legislation, now under review, immediately came under heavy fire. One restaurant owner in the Chaozhou region declared: “This is ridiculous! You make dog and cat meat illegal, but aren’t chickens, duck, goose, pig, cow, lamb also animals?” Another noted a local saying: “When the dog meat is being simmered, even the gods become dizzy with hunger.”

I’m with these indignant protesters. I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.

But, as I’ve learned, logic has its limits. It’s the heart not the head that governs this world under the sway of the dizzy gods.

I guess Mr. Cohen never heard about the potbellied pig craze of a few years ago…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.

Yet they aren’t facts. Many economists take a much calmer view of budget deficits than anything you’ll see on TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at historically low interest rates. The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren’t — and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe.

So why the sudden ubiquity of deficit scare stories? It isn’t being driven by any actual news. It has been obvious for at least a year that the U.S. government would face an extended period of large deficits, and projections of those deficits haven’t changed much since last summer. Yet the drumbeat of dire fiscal warnings has grown vastly louder.

To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency. Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.

And fear-mongering on the deficit may end up doing as much harm as the fear-mongering on weapons of mass destruction.

Let’s talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.

The point is that running big deficits in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s is actually the right thing to do. If anything, deficits should be bigger than they are because the government should be doing more than it is to create jobs.

True, there is a longer-term budget problem. Even a full economic recovery wouldn’t balance the budget, and it probably wouldn’t even reduce the deficit to a permanently sustainable level. So once the economic crisis is past, the U.S. government will have to increase its revenue and control its costs. And in the long run there’s no way to make the budget math work unless something is done about health care costs.

But there’s no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade. Consider, for example, what the latest budget proposal from the Obama administration says about interest payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they’ll have risen to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. How scary is that? It’s about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush.

Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.

The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride, and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?

The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.

For the fact is that thanks to deficit hysteria, Washington now has its priorities all wrong: all the talk is about how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there’s hardly any willingness to tackle mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction — and millions of Americans will pay the price.

Collins and Kristof

In “Florida, We Have a Problem” Ms. Collins says cutting a federal program is next to impossible because there’s usually somebody who cares much more about keeping it than the White House does about making it go away.  Mr. Kristof is in Bukavu, Congo and sends us “From ‘Oprah’ to Building a Sisterhood in Congo.”  He says in a land where so many “responsible” leaders eschew responsibility, an American has gone out of her way to assume responsibility and try to make a difference.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

The Obama administration’s proposed budget holds many surprises.

O.K., you have to be kind of dorky to make that statement.

Still, how can you not be fascinated when the White House announces it wants to cancel plans to put an American on the moon by 2020?

Weren’t we already there? I have a distinct memory of watching a guy who looked a little like the Pillsbury Doughboy, planting an American flag in moon dirt back in 1969. The TV was black and white. Walter Cronkite was so excited.

And didn’t George W. Bush promise to get us to Mars? Well, the first step to Mars is apparently moon-visitation. NASA now admits the best-case scenario for that is actually 2030.

After that, of course, things would move much faster, until a midflight technical malfunction puts Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon in mortal danger. But things will end happily. Before you know it, the Dow hits 1,000, Richard Nixon resigns, and Mars, here we come.

The White House wants to save $3.4 billion a year with a game-changing/paradigm-shifting space program that does not require any moon landings. The new goal is a little hazy. But it involves, as a spokeswoman for the space agency put it, “going farther, faster, to interesting destinations as we learn things.”

Beyond that, all I can tell you for sure is that it will be bold. But bold in a less-expensive way.

In Washington, this is always a time of innocent hope, when earnest budgeteers look for unnecessary programs to ax so they can prove to the country that government is efficient. This year, the Department of Education wins the fiscal tidiness award, having proposed to eliminate seven programs, consolidate 38 others and wipe out $123 million in earmarks.

Good work, Department of Education! And good luck actually getting rid of them.

Cutting a federal program is next to impossible because there’s usually somebody who cares much more about keeping it than the White House does about making it go away. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida is already making soft whimpering noises about the NASA budget cuts, which will, if necessary, eventually rise to guttural howls.

Before the budget document even went out, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York had issued a scathing press release attacking plans to eliminate $5 million in grants to manufacturers of worsted wool.

“I will fight to make sure this proposal never sees the light of day,” said Schumer, who claimed that dropping the grants could ruin “Rochester’s iconic Hickey Freeman,” a men’s clothing company. It turned out that Hickey Freeman gets a different wool-manufacturer break entirely. Rochester is saved!

My own favorite target for extinction is a $9 million annual appropriation for museums and educational programs that highlight the “shared culture and tradition” of Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians and “children and families of Massachusetts.”

In other words, whaling.

This was originally the idea of Ted Kennedy and two colleagues from Alaska and Hawaii. Perhaps they had all just finished rereading “Moby-Dick” in a Senate book club. Or maybe somebody bet them they couldn’t think of an earmark that would apply to only their three states.

In 2006, Congress did vote to add a fourth beneficiary of the whaling museum money — the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi. No one seems to know why, but we’re pretty sure it has more to do with the state’s earmark-loving senior senator, Thad Cochran, than Mississippi’s rich whaling tradition.

Cochran happens to be vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and I’m betting he also has the answer to why the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation, which was established to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America, is still in business 18 years after the fact. I am only saying this because the vice chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees is the former leader of the Mississippi Republican Party. The chairwoman is a Republican realtor from Arizona.

“I feel so terrible,” one budget maven told me. “I always secretly imagined it had something to do with Nancy Pelosi.”

The Columbus foundation gives out prizes to people who, um, discover things and runs a contest for middle school students who have ideas about community improvement. The winners go to Disney World and then to the Christopher Columbus Academy, which also happens to be in Disney World.

Is that worth a million dollars a year in federal money? I’m more jealous than angry. I’ve always wanted to get something really neat and wasteful from Washington, like a pigeon museum.

But, no, all we get are grants to look for explosives in the harbor.

It does seem as if the people who spend all their time carping about the deficit should step up to the plate, though. We are looking at you, Scott Brown. Give back that whale money.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

Five years ago, Lisa Shannon watched “Oprah” and learned about the savage, forgotten war here in eastern Congo, played out in massacres and mass rape. That show transformed Lisa’s life, costing her a good business, a beloved fiancé, and a comfortable home in Portland, Ore. — but giving her a chance to save lives in Congo.

I found myself stepping with Lisa into a shack here. It was night, there was no electricity, and a tropical rainstorm was turning the shantytown into a field of mud and streams. Lisa had come to visit a woman she calls her sister, Generose Namburho, a 40-year-old nurse.

Generose’s story is numbingly familiar: extremist Hutu militiamen invaded her home one night, killed her husband and prepared to rape her. Then, because she shouted in an attempt to warn her neighbors, they hacked off her leg above the knee with a machete.

As Generose lay bleeding near her husband’s corpse, the soldiers cut up the amputated leg, cooked the pieces on the kitchen fire, and ordered her children to eat their mother’s flesh. One son, a 12-year-old, refused. “If you kill me, kill me,” he told the soldiers, as his mother remembers it. “But I will not eat a part of my mother.”

So they shot him dead. The murder is one of Generose’s last memories before she blacked out, waking up days later in the hospital where she had worked.

That’s where Lisa enters the story. After seeing the Oprah show on the Congo war, Lisa began to read more about it, learning that it is the most lethal conflict since World War II. More than five million had already died as of the last peer-reviewed mortality estimate in 2007.

Everybody told her that the atrocities continued because nobody cared. Lisa, who is now 34, was appalled and decided to show that she cared. She asked friends to sponsor her for a solo 30-mile fund-raising run for Congolese women.

That led her to establish Run for Congo Women, which has held fund-raising runs in 10 American states and three foreign countries. The money goes to support sponsorships of Congolese women through a group called Women for Women International.

But in her passion, Lisa neglected the stock photo business that she and her fiancé ran together. Finally, he signaled to her that she had to choose — and she chose Congo.

One of the Congolese women (“sisters”) whom Lisa sponsored with her fund-raising was Generose. Lisa’s letters and monthly checks of $27 began arriving just in time.

“God sent me Lisa to release me,” Generose told me fervently, as the rain pounded the roof, and she then compared Lisa to an angel and to Jesus Christ.

Scrunching up in embarrassment in the darkened room, Lisa fended off deification. She noted that many impoverished Congolese families have taken in orphans. “They’ve lost everything,” she said, “but they take children in when they can’t even feed their own properly. I’ve been so inspired by them. I’ve tried to restructure my life to emulate them.”

It’s true. While for years world leaders have mostly looked the other way, while our friend Rwanda has helped perpetuate this war, while Congo’s president has refused to arrest a general wanted by the International Criminal Court, while global companies have accepted tin, coltan and other minerals produced by warlords — amid all this irresponsibility, many ordinary Congolese have stepped forward to share the nothing they have with their neighbors.

So Lisa is right that Generose and so many others here are awe-inspiring. Lisa tells her story in a moving book, “A Thousand Sisters,” that is set to be published in April. Congo is now her obsession, and she is volunteering full time on the cause as she lives off the declining royalties from her old stock photos.

She earns psychic pay when she sees a woman here who named her daughter Lisa. After we visited Congolese Lisa, I asked American Lisa about the toll of her Congo obsession — the lost business, man and home they had shared.

“Technically, I had a good life before, but I wasn’t very happy,” she mused. “Now I feel I have much more of a sense of meaning.”

Maybe that’s why I gravitate toward Lisa’s story. In a land where so many “responsible” leaders eschew responsibility, Lisa has gone out of her way to assume responsibility and try to make a difference. Along with an unbelievable cast of plucky Congolese survivors such as Generose, she evokes hope.

On this visit to Congo, Lisa is organizing a Run for Congo Women right here in Bukavu, for Feb. 28, with Congolese rape survivors participating. You can sponsor them at www.runforCongowomen.org. And one of those participating in the run, hobbling along on crutches and her one leg, will be Generose.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo poses a question in “Defending the Long Gay Line:”  How many pragmatists does it take to change a law that asks soldiers who live by a code of honor to lie about who they are?  I shouldn’t be surprised that she used one of my Senators, the inestimable, detestable Saxby Chambliss, as her example of stupidity…  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “When Economics Meets Politics,” says the world needs 2010 to be a quiet year, but that will require our global problems to be defused with win-win compromises rather than win-lose confrontations.  He sends this in from Doha, Qatar.  Riiiiight, Tommy…  That’s about to happen…  I want some of whatever it is he has in his water cooler.  Here’s MoDo:

I’ve had high hopes for Adm. Mike Mullen ever since I learned that his mom was an assistant to Jimmy Durante and his dad was a Hollywood press agent whose clients included Bob Hope, Ann-Margret, Phyllis Diller, Jimmy Stewart, Carol Burnett and Dyan Cannon.

That’s the dream U.S.O. tour.

On Tuesday, the craggy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff showed that a lifetime in the military has not knocked all the showbiz pizazz out of him.

“I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Mullen said during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on dropping the archaic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “For me personally, it comes down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”

In heartfelt testimony to the senators, Mullen said: “I have served with homosexuals since 1968.” Acknowledging that they face death daily, he said that “putting individuals in a position that every single day they wonder whether today’s going to be the day, and devaluing them in that regard, just is inconsistent with us as an institution.”

In 1993, when Bill Clinton tried to do the right thing by allowing gays and lesbians in the military to be themselves, a predecessor of Mullen’s, Colin Powell, directed the embarrassingly public and retrograde rebellion by the generals against it, leading a conga line of heavy brass over to the White House to tell the president not to exercise his authority as commander in chief and order an end to one of the last vestiges of discrimination in the armed forces. Powell helped shape the gutless compromise that those who protect our country must live by a code of honor even while they’re legally bound to be less than honest.

Still traumatized by the 1993 pummeling Clinton endured, the Obama White House is inching forward, like soldiers under attack crawling on their bellies through the dirt, trying to avoid friendly fire from gay groups that want the law changed now and hostile fire from conservatives that want the law left alone.

Before Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates even made their opening statements, John McCain went on the attack against overturning the policy. Noting that gays and lesbians had served “admirably” and even given their lives, he said: “I honor their sacrifice, and I honor them.” Just as long as they deny their identity and pretend to be something they’re not.

The conservative senator who has always been known for honor and clarity cited “vast complexities” as a reason not to change the hypocritical policy, whatever that means, as well as the fact that “the Senate vigorously debated it in 1993.” (One complexity was our failure to realize that, with two wars in the Middle East, we might need some talented gay translators fluent in Arabic and Farsi.)

Yeah, nothing’s changed since 1993.

Even Powell now admits that “we definitely should re-evaluate it.” And Roland Burris, the Illinois senator, reminded his colleagues that it took Harry Truman to integrate the services: “At one time, my uncles and members of my race couldn’t even serve in the military, and we moved to this point where they’re some of the best and brightest that we’ve had — generals and even now the commander in chief is of African-American heritage.”

McCain jumped on his even-keeled fellow Republican, Bob Gates, and accused him of usurping Congressional authority by saying the military was pre-emptively preparing for a repeal of the law. I guess the former war hero doesn’t believe in military readiness.

The Arizona senator said the law was “imperfect but effective,” even though Admiral Mullen’s military journal, Joint Force Quarterly, called it a “costly failure” and denied that the cohesion of the forces would be hurt if gays and lesbians could be open about their sexuality, as they are in Britain and Canada.

Three years ago, McCain told a group of college students that he would drop his objections on the issue “the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy.’ ”

But, on Tuesday, when that day came, McCain ignored the top brass and found his own military emeritus. He waved a letter at Gates and Mullen, saying it was “signed by over 1,000 former generals and flag officers who have weighed in” against changing the policy.

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said that if they began to loosen one restriction, others might unravel, leading to a louche atmosphere brimming with “alcohol use, adultery, fraternization and body art.” Don’t ask, don’t tat.

In 1993, Sam Nunn, the conservative Georgia Democrat who was the leader of the Armed Services Committee, famously gave lawmakers a tour of a submarine and its showers to show what close quarters sailors endured, implying that it would be impossible to separate the men from the men if gays were out.

So it was a welcome sign of how things have changed that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stepped up to torpedo the hypocrisy, is an admiral.

You think it’s easy living in a state represented by Saxby Chambliss?  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

One of the few pleasant surprises of 2009 was that the world’s biggest economies were able to concentrate on healing themselves without any major wars or world-shaking political or geopolitical disruptions. What are the odds that 2010 will be so benign? I’d say quite low. No question, the world’s major economies badly need 2010 to be another quiet year politically and geopolitically, but that will require, at a minimum, that three major struggles — the banks vs. President Obama, China vs. Google & friends, and the world vs. Iran — can be defused with win-win compromises rather than win-lose confrontations.

Let’s look at all three. Banks are like the heart that pumps blood — credit — to our country’s corporate muscles. If that heart is malfunctioning, any recovery will be anemic. But heart surgery is a very complex thing. You wouldn’t want yours done by a plumber or a politician. After all, a year ago there was a great clamor to nationalize some major banks; that would not have been a good idea. Moreover, our financial crisis was the result of a broad national breakdown in ethics — from borrowers to lenders to rating agencies to lawmakers. Don’t think for a second that bank reform alone is a cure-all.

We need a new banking regulatory regime that reduces recklessness without reducing risk-taking, which is the key to capitalism. It’s complicated. If the leading banks had any brains, they would take the initiative and offer their own ideas. Surely, they can’t argue everything is just fine given the number of bank failures. Let the administration and other leading central banks also offer their ideas, and then let’s try to forge something smart.

What the public has seen instead, though, are clueless bankers giving themselves bonuses after being rescued by taxpayers, while instructing the lobbyists and lawmakers they own to resist any serious reforms. At the same time, we’ve had President Obama introducing his bank proposal, after his party’s Massachusetts defeat, in a way that seemed less intended to promote an intelligent discussion and more like an effort to use bank-bashing to boost sagging poll ratings. The administration didn’t even bother to prebrief other central bankers about its ideas.

A senior British Treasury official told me at a background briefing in Davos: “Even America isn’t big enough to solve this problem on its own. … This is a global problem. … Be sure you understand the problem before you fix it.”

Banking reform has to be done carefully so that we end up with stronger banks lending more money. If the bankers want to be pigheaded and turn this into a war with the president, or the president wants to use bank-bashing to get his mojo back, there are a few things I can absolutely guarantee: more uncertainty, less lending, a slower recovery and fewer new jobs.

While the struggle between China and Google appears, on the surface, to be about Internet freedom, beneath the surface is a much deeper problem. As this newspaper reported last week, 34 American corporations have recently been targets of hacking attacks traceable to China. The C.E.O. of one of the technology companies that was hit, who asked not to be identified because he is still debating whether to keep doing business in China, said that in his case the attacks involved attempts to vacuum up source codes, designs, business plans, and anything else they could get their hands on. This industrial espionage emanating from China, the C.E.O. told me, “was the worst we have seen in 25 years.” As one U.S. official described it: “The penetration was very extensive and deeply troubling.”

Memo to China: You are playing with fire. Sure, the U.S. also has its hackers, but industrial espionage on this scale is not coming out of the U.S. If this continues, China will see more than Google pull up stakes. And how many U.S. companies in the future will ever want to buy Chinese-made software or computer systems, which might only make it easier for Beijing to penetrate their businesses? This hacking story is huge and brewing. If it explodes, at a time of rising tensions over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, fasten your seat belts.

Finally, the U.S. and its allies are about to ratchet up pressure on Iran by unveiling a new economic-sanctions resolution at the U.N. aimed at Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and the vast network of financial institutions it controls inside Iran. If the U.N. will not act, the U.S. and key allies intend to impose the sanctions on their own. The Revolutionary Guards have become the regime’s primary tool for suppressing the popular uprising there and for protecting Iran’s nuclear program. If these sanctions prove incapable of getting Iran to halt its suspected nuclear weapons program, the chances for a U.S. or Israeli military strike against Iran will grow very high before the end of this year. Here in the Persian Gulf, apprehension is off the charts.

The economics of recovery were always hard, but in 2010 politics and geopolitics could make them even harder. Pray that cooler heads prevail.

I’ll also pray for pigs to fly…

Brooks, Collins, Cohen and Herbert

God help us all, Bobo is on a crusade.  Well, actually not.  He wants OTHER people to join “The Geezers’ Crusade.”  This asshole says that it now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the older generation takes it upon themselves to arise and force change.  (He apparently expects us “geezers” to “organize around the cause of nonselfishness.”  I love being lectured by a Republican hack about being nonselfish.)  Ms. Collins addresses “Illinois’s Daddy Problem” and says Illinois voters go to the polls Tuesday for primaries in which every candidate is looking to run as an outsider, regardless of family ties.  Mr. Cohen takes it upon himself to discuss “Obama’s Halfway House,” and says President Obama’s gut tells him the world demands new policies, but Washington politics keep him stuck in the conventional.  Mr. Herbert directs our attention to “Jim Crow Policing” and says the fact that a certain percentage of crimes are committed by Hispanics or blacks is no reason for the police to increasingly harass individuals from those groups.  Here’s that hack Bobo:

We like to think that in days gone by, the young venerated the elderly. But that wasn’t always so. In “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s morose character, Jaques, calls old age “second childishness and mere oblivion.” Walt Whitman hoped that the tedium and pettiness of his senior years would not infect his poetry.

Developmental psychologists, when they treated old age at all, often regarded it as a period of withdrawal. The elderly slowly separate themselves from the world. They cannot be expected to achieve new transformations. “About the age of fifty,” Freud wrote, “the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.”

Well, that was wrong. Over the past few years, researchers have found that the brain is capable of creating new connections and even new neurons all through life. While some mental processes — like working memory and the ability to quickly solve math problems — clearly deteriorate, others do not. Older people retain their ability to remember emotionally nuanced events. They are able to integrate memories from their left and right hemispheres. Their brains reorganize to help compensate for the effects of aging.

A series of longitudinal studies, begun decades ago, are producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development — and they’re not even talking about über-oldsters jumping out of airplanes.

People are most unhappy in middle age and report being happier as they get older. This could be because as people age they pay less attention to negative emotional stimuli, according to a study by the psychologists Mara Mather, Turhan Canli and others.

Gender roles begin to merge. Many women get more assertive while many men get more emotionally attuned. Personalities often become more vivid as people become more of what they already are. Norma Haan of the University of California, Berkeley, and others conducted a 50-year follow-up of people who had been studied while young and concluded that the subjects had become more outgoing, self-confident and warm with age.

The research paints a comforting picture. And the nicest part is that virtue is rewarded. One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.

The odd thing is that when you turn to political life, we are living in an age of reverse-generativity. Far from serving the young, the old are now taking from them. First, they are taking money. According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.

Second, they are taking freedom. In 2009, for the first time in American history, every single penny of federal tax revenue went to pay for mandatory spending programs, according to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute. As more money goes to pay off promises made mostly to the old, the young have less control.

Third, they are taking opportunity. For decades, federal spending has hovered around 20 percent of G.D.P. By 2019, it is forecast to be at 25 percent and rising. The higher tax rates implied by that spending will mean less growth and fewer opportunities. Already, pension costs in many states are squeezing education spending.

In the private sphere, in other words, seniors provide wonderful gifts to their grandchildren, loving attention that will linger in young minds, providing support for decades to come. In the public sphere, they take it away.

I used to think that political leaders could avert fiscal suicide. But it’s now clear change will not be led from Washington. On the other hand, over the past couple of years we’ve seen the power of spontaneous social movements: first the movement that formed behind Barack Obama, and now, equally large, the Tea Party movement.

Spontaneous social movements can make the unthinkable thinkable, and they can do it quickly. It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

It may seem unrealistic — to expect a generation to organize around the cause of nonselfishness. But in the private sphere, you see it every day. Old people now have the time, the energy and, with the Internet, the tools to organize.

The elderly. They are our future.

Eat a shit sandwich, Bobo.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Illinois voters go to the polls Tuesday to vote in a whole mess of important primaries. Barack Obama’s Senate seat on the line! Republican moderates vs. Tea Partyists! And once again, we are in the world of the angry voter.

Really angry. Compared with Illinois, Massachusetts is Athens in the age of Pericles.

Every single person running in the Illinois primaries seems to be an outsider. The state comptroller is an outsider. The former Republican party chairman is an outsider. If Rod Blagojevich were allowed to run for things anymore, he’d be in this as an outsider. As things stand, however, the former governor is a contender only in the upcoming season of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

For those of us who don’t live in Illinois and therefore don’t have to worry about that $80 billion in unfinanced pension liabilities, the big story is Obama’s Senate seat. On the Democratic side, the front-runner for the nomination is Alexi Giannoulias. Definitely an outsider. The man is only 33 — how could he have had enough time to get inside?

Giannoulias is also the state treasurer and a former bank executive. If you are wondering how he managed to climb so far so fast, let me mention that his family owns the bank. A bank that made loans to people with shady connections and is currently under federal oversight, but still, it was undoubtedly a great learning experience.

Giannoulias’s other claim to fame is that he is an old basketball-playing buddy of Obama’s. The White House is so enthusiastic about his candidacy that the administration tried unsuccessfully to get Lisa Madigan, the attorney general, to run instead.

One of his opponents is Cheryle Robinson Jackson, the head of the Chicago Urban League. Jackson, who points out very frequently that she is a woman, is also the only African-American in the race. On the unhelpful side, she used to be spokeswoman for the only contestant on the upcoming “Celebrity Apprentice” who is both a former Illinois governor and under indictment.

The Democrat who seems to be moving up in the polls is David Hoffman, the former Chicago inspector general. The inspector general is charged with rooting out corruption, waste and mismanagement. Chicagoans, in a fit of practicality, made this a permanent job in order to save valuable start-up time with every scandal.

If Hoffman should manage to win, it will be a big upset that will demonstrate that the hunger for change extends beyond Tea Partyists and disgruntled independents, into the very heart of the regular Democrats. It will also be yet another sign that, in their contempt for politicians, voters are now willing to trust only people whose past experience is limited to taking their opponents to court.

On the Republican side, the front-runner is Mark Kirk, a moderate congressman from the Chicago suburbs. There is no way you can possibly call Kirk an outsider, what with his being inside and all. And, as his more conservative opponents keep pointing out, there is no way you can call him a Tea Party candidate, what with his being … moderate.

But factionalism is so … January. The Republicans are in the Scott Brown zone. Kirk is running around reminding people that the Senate seat in question is “not Obama’s seat but the people’s seat,” and doing everything to look Brownlike short of taking off his clothes for a Cosmo spread.

Meanwhile, just to be safe, he has denounced his own vote for the House cap-and-trade energy legislation and has been begging Sarah Palin for an endorsement.

Illinois is in such a mess that no one appears to want to spend much time talking about that unfinanced pension thing. Mainly, the various candidates just look for new and more innovative ways to defame one another.

For instance, there’s a primary for the Republican nomination in a Congressional district that used to be represented by Denny Hastert, the former House speaker.

Hastert’s 31-year-old son, Ethan, is running for the seat. This is apt since virtually every person running for anything in Illinois seems to be mainly known as the child of somebody else.

His opponent in the primary is a state senator, Randy Hultgren, who claimed in one of his mailers that Hastert’s law firm “lobbies on behalf of foreign mining companies with … a history of human trafficking.” Even in these perilous times, it is not often that you see human trafficking pop up in a Congressional campaign.

When Hastert pushed back, his opponent responded not by retracting the statement, but by recording a robocall apologizing to the voters for taking the campaign “away from the issues.”

This could be the beginning of a dangerous trend. Every time a public figure does something regrettable, I do not want to have to hear him apologizing on a recorded message during the dinner hour. Particularly if it’s John Edwards.

Now here’s Mr. Cohen:

I had very high hopes for Barack Obama. I still do. He’s smart, curious, informed — and he has a sense of humor, if only he’d display it more. But he inherited a nation in a funk and, one year into his presidency, he’s not found a way to lift the mood. Americans feel mired.

At a fundamental level, that funk is about a power shift. The United States is not what it was. It got attacked and the response has proved draining in blood and treasure. Anger accumulated, frustrations and debt grew. America’s 20th-century role is unraveling, albeit slowly, but its 21st-century role is not yet born.

Like it or not, we are witnessing the relative decline of the West. It’s going to be a long, slow movie but I don’t think the plot is going to reverse itself.

This transition prompts a couple of reactions. One is “To heck with the world.” Many Republicans (and Sarah Palin comes to mind) are in this my-way-or-the-highway place. The other is: Let’s adjust to the new reality through outreach and a new modesty. Obama is somewhere in that zone.

The thing is the president needs some results. I see him caught in a kind of halfway house. His gut tells him the world has changed and demands new policies but Washington politics keep him stuck in the conventional. His first year on the world stage has offered innovative speeches but largely unoriginal policy.

I suspect he’s not yet confident enough to have the courage of his convictions. Or perhaps he just needs more grown-ups in the White House. The transition from a very successful campaign to power is still a work in progress. If I get another mass e-mailing from the White House about what Obama’s “movement” needs next, the response will be ugly. That’s not how you govern.

The issue is change. Obama has spoken of “a new foundation.” It’s needed within and without, where the vital centers of growth have shifted to China, India, Brazil. But change is not about speeches. It’s about conviction and courage. I don’t see it happening for the moment — not with respect to Beijing, or Tehran, or Jerusalem, or Havana, or … Well, the list could go on.

In the 1950s, as he watched his country getting embroiled in the conflict that would become the Vietnam War, a U.S. official observed: “Whether the French like it or not, independence is coming to Indochina. Why therefore do we tie ourselves to the tail of their battered kite?”

Obama is still hitched to too many battered kites.

There was the $6 billion-plus arms sale to Taiwan, which predictably enraged Beijing. No re-imagined relationship with China is going to emerge as long as Beijing views Washington as meddling with its core strategic interests in this way. How Obama thinks he can double U.S. exports by 2015 while provoking China is a mystery. How he expects any meaningful cooperation on Iran is equally hard to fathom.

When I was in China last month, I asked the Foreign Ministry about Iran policy. I got a pretty clear written response: “We think sanctions would not fundamentally solve the problem. There are still diplomatic means that we can try regarding the nuclear issue.” The Foreign Ministry told me China stood strongly behind nonproliferation but called for patience in “resolving the Iranian nuclear issue in a comprehensive and peaceful way.”

That’s a very considerable distance from Obama’s tone in his State of the Union address, where he lumped Iran with North Korea (being so utterly different, they should not be paired) and warned Iranian leaders that they “will face growing consequences. That is a promise.”

What did I say about a halfway house? Obama wants a new relationship with China but he’s stuck with the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. He seeks a new relationship with Tehran but is relapsing into the old, sterile sanctions-threatening pattern at a moment of great political fluidity in Iran when American saber-rattling is counterproductive. It is outreach that has unnerved the Iranian regime; threats serve the hard-liners. I’m with Chinese patience for now.

In the Middle East, where he wants to redefine America’s relationship with the Muslim world, and advance peace between Israel and Palestine, Obama finds himself listening to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent vows to keep some settlements in the West Bank “for eternity.” He has been unable to change the dynamic of ever widening estrangement between Israelis and Palestinians. I’ve seen no big new ideas, just a cool acquiescence to the Netanyahu’s “nyets” that help make “two-state solution” one of the weariest phrases on the planet.

The only area where Obama’s actions have been more eloquent than words is in the elimination last year of Al Qaeda fighters — “far more than in 2008,” the president said. This is a new but so far undeclared Obama doctrine: large-scale targeted killings. It’s cheaper and more effective than ground invasions but raises issues that can’t be passed over in silence.

New foundations are needed. But they can’t be built in halfway houses.

And last but not least here’s Mr. Herbert:

The New York City Police Department needs to be restrained. The nonstop humiliation of young black and Hispanic New Yorkers, including children, by police officers who feel no obligation to treat them fairly or with any respect at all is an abomination. That many of the officers engaged in the mistreatment are black or Latino themselves is shameful.

Statistics will be out shortly about the total number of people who were stopped and frisked by the police in 2009. We already have the data for the first three-quarters of the year, and they are staggering. During that period, more than 450,000 people were stopped by the cops, an increase of 13 percent over the same period in 2008.

An overwhelming 84 percent of the stops in the first three-quarters of 2009 were of black or Hispanic New Yorkers. It is incredible how few of the stops yielded any law enforcement benefit. Contraband, which usually means drugs, was found in only 1.6 percent of the stops of black New Yorkers. For Hispanics, it was just 1.5 percent. For whites, who are stopped far less frequently, contraband was found 2.2 percent of the time.

The percentages of stops that yielded weapons were even smaller. Weapons were found on just 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics, and 1.7 percent of the whites. Only about 6 percent of stops result in an arrest for any reason.

Rather than a legitimate crime-fighting tool, these stops are a despicable, racially oriented tool of harassment. And the police are using it at the increasingly enthusiastic direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

There were more than a half-million stops in New York City in 2008, and when the final tally is in, we’ll find that the number only increased in 2009.

Not everyone who is stopped is frisked. When broken down by ethnic group, the percentages do not at first seem so wildly disproportionate. Some 59.4 percent of all Hispanics who were stopped were also frisked, as were 56.6 percent of blacks, and 46 percent of whites. But keep in mind, whites composed fewer than 16 percent of the people stopped in the first place.

These encounters with the police are degrading and often frightening, and the real number of people harassed is undoubtedly higher than the numbers reported by the police. Often the cops will stop, frisk and sometimes taunt people who are at their mercy, and then move on — without finding anything, making an arrest, or recording the encounter as they are supposed to.

Even the official reasons given by the police for the stops are laughably bogus. People are stopped for allegedly making “furtive movements,” for wearing clothes “commonly used in a crime,” and, of course, for the “suspicious bulge.” My wallet, my notebook and my cellphone would all apply.

The police say they also stop people for wearing “inappropriate attire for the season.” I saw a guy on the Upper West Side wearing shorts and sandals a couple weeks ago. That was certainly unusual attire for the middle of January, but it didn’t cross my mind that he should be accosted by the police.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and the Police Department over the stops. Several plaintiffs detailed how their ordinary daily lives were interrupted by cops bent on harassment for no good reason. Lalit Carson was stopped while on a lunch break from his job as a teaching assistant at a charter school in the Bronx. Deon Dennis was stopped and searched while standing outside the apartment building in which he lives in Harlem. The police arrested him, allegedly because of an outstanding warrant. He was held for several hours then released. There was no outstanding warrant.

There are endless instances of this kind of madness. People going about their daily business, bothering no one, are menaced out of the blue by the police, forced to spread themselves face down in the street, or plaster themselves against a wall, or bend over the hood of a car, to be searched. People who object to the harassment are often threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct.

The Police Department insists that these stops of innocent people — which are unconstitutional, by the way — help fight crime. And they insist that the policy is not racist.

Paul Browne, the chief spokesman for Commissioner Kelly, described the stops as “life-saving.” And he has said repeatedly that the racial makeup of the people stopped and frisked is proportionally similar to the racial makeup of people committing crimes.

That is an amazingly specious argument. The fact that a certain percentage of criminals may be black or Hispanic is no reason for the police to harass individuals from those groups when there is no indication whatsoever that they have done anything wrong.

It’s time to put an end to Jim Crow policing in New York City.

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

Oh, sweet, sweet baby Jesus…  The Pasty Little Putz is taking on sex ed.  God, I hate Mondays.  In “Sex Ed in Washington” he tells us that federalizing the abstinence-versus-contraception debate drags the national government into a decision that should remain intensely local.  Man, I’ll bet his Chunky Reese Witherspoon blesses the day he limped (no pun intended there, nope, none at all) away from their encounter.  Prof. Krugman, in “Good and Boring,” says Canada’s regulatory habit of limiting the risk and leverage banks can accept helped protect that country from recessionary fallout.  Here’s The Putz:

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education. The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication. On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

In “When Sex Goes to School,” her thoughtful history of the sex education debate, the sociologist Kristin Luker concluded that it is “surprisingly difficult to show that sex education programs do in fact increase teenagers’ willingness to protect themselves from pregnancy and/or disease.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s attended high school. What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem. (And, of course, the impact of entertainment: the MTV reality show “Teen Mom” is far more absorbing than the average sex-ed curriculum, and probably more influential as well.)

Predictably, the rare initiatives that show impressive results tend to be defined more by their emphasis on building social capital than by their insistence on either chastity or contraception. A 2001 survey published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, for instance, found that “most studies of school-based and school-linked health centers revealed no effect on student sexual behavior or contraceptive use.” The exceptions included an abstinence-oriented program with a strong community-service requirement, and a comprehensive program that essentially provided life coaching as well as sex ed: participants were offered “academic support (e.g., tutoring); employment; self-expression through the arts; sports; and health care.”

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless. But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy. Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

The debate might be less rancorous if the naturalists and sacralists didn’t have to fight it out in Washington. This is the real problem with federal financing for abstinence-based education: It drags the national government into a debate that should remain intensely local.

We federalize the culture wars all the time, of course — from Roe v. Wade to the Defense of Marriage Act. But it’s a polarizing habit, and well worth kicking.

If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached. (And yes, this goes for the dollars that currently flow to Planned Parenthood as well as the money that supports abstinence programs.) Don’t try to encourage Berkeley values in Alabama, or vice versa.

America’s competing visions of sexuality — permissive and traditional, naturalist and sacralist — have been in conflict since the 1960s. They’ll probably be in conflict for generations yet to come.

But as long as they are, it shouldn’t be Washington’s job to choose between them.

Ask the Palin family about abstinence education, you hopeless asshole.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

In times of crisis, good news is no news. Iceland’s meltdown made headlines; the remarkable stability of Canada’s banks, not so much.

Yet as the world’s attention shifts from financial rescue to financial reform, the quiet success stories deserve at least as much attention as the spectacular failures. We need to learn from those countries that evidently did it right. And leading that list is our neighbor to the north. Right now, Canada is a very important role model.

Yes, I know, Canada is supposed to be dull. The New Republic famously pronounced “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” (from a Times Op-Ed column in the ’80s) the world’s most boring headline. But I’ve always considered Canada fascinating, precisely because it’s similar to the United States in many but not all ways. The point is that when Canadian and U.S. experience diverge, it’s a very good bet that policy differences, rather than differences in culture or economic structure, are responsible for that divergence.

And anyway, when it comes to banking, boring is good.

First, some background. Over the past decade the United States and Canada faced the same global environment. Both were confronted with the same flood of cheap goods and cheap money from Asia. Economists in both countries cheerfully declared that the era of severe recessions was over.

But when things fell apart, the consequences were very different here and there. In the United States, mortgage defaults soared, some major financial institutions collapsed, and others survived only thanks to huge government bailouts. In Canada, none of that happened. What did the Canadians do differently?

It wasn’t interest rate policy. Many commentators have blamed the Federal Reserve for the financial crisis, claiming that the Fed created a disastrous bubble by keeping interest rates too low for too long. But Canadian interest rates have tracked U.S. rates quite closely, so it seems that low rates aren’t enough by themselves to produce a financial crisis.

Canada’s experience also seems to refute the view, forcefully pushed by Paul Volcker, the formidable former Fed chairman, that the roots of our crisis lay in the scale and scope of our financial institutions — in the existence of banks that were “too big to fail.” For in Canada essentially all the banks are too big to fail: just five banking groups dominate the financial scene.

On the other hand, Canada’s experience does seem to support the views of people like Elizabeth Warren, the head of the Congressional panel overseeing the bank bailout, who place much of the blame for the crisis on failure to protect consumers from deceptive lending. Canada has an independent Financial Consumer Agency, and it has sharply restricted subprime-type lending.

Above all, Canada’s experience seems to support those who say that the way to keep banking safe is to keep it boring — that is, to limit the extent to which banks can take on risk. The United States used to have a boring banking system, but Reagan-era deregulation made things dangerously interesting. Canada, by contrast, has maintained a happy tedium.

More specifically, Canada has been much stricter about limiting banks’ leverage, the extent to which they can rely on borrowed funds. It has also limited the process of securitization, in which banks package and resell claims on their loans outstanding — a process that was supposed to help banks reduce their risk by spreading it, but has turned out in practice to be a way for banks to make ever-bigger wagers with other people’s money.

There’s no question that in recent years these restrictions meant fewer opportunities for bankers to come up with clever ideas than would have been available if Canada had emulated America’s deregulatory zeal. But that, it turns out, was all to the good.

So what are the chances that the United States will learn from Canada’s success?

Actually, the financial reform bill that the House of Representatives passed in December would significantly Canadianize the U.S. system. It would create an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency, it would establish limits on leverage, and it would limit securitization by requiring that lenders hold on to some of their loans.

But prospects for a comparable bill getting the 60 votes now needed to push anything through the Senate are doubtful. Republicans are clearly dead set against any significant financial reform — not a single Republican voted for the House bill — and some Democrats are ambivalent, too.

So there’s a good chance that we’ll do nothing, or nothing much, to prevent future banking crises. But it won’t be because we don’t know what to do: we’ve got a clear example of how to keep banking safe sitting right next door.